The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Erik Bernhardsson Just Can’t Stop Solving Problems

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal Labs.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. We just had a fascinating conversation with Eric Bernardson, and he has done some amazing things. Part of two startups, a little music streaming service called Spotify that you might have heard of, was there very early. A handful of people, better. An insurance company started there when it was 10 people that grew to over 10,000 people.

So talk about exponential growth. And now he's working on his own thing, which is fascinating. Costas, I think one of the most interesting things that stuck out to me, which we talked a little bit about when we wrapped the show up, was seeing the patterns of what Eric had learned throughout those experiences and how he's applying that to what he's building at Modal, which is really interesting. So not only the lessons from scale, but also user experience things from Spotify that he's applying to what is essentially sort of like a dev infrastructure solution, code deployment solution. So I thought it was really cool

to see someone who's been through such an amazing journey retain what seemed like really high impact lessons from decades ago and still applying those to like completely different problems in completely different spaces, but in a way that seems really, really powerful. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if I, if I would keep something from like the conversation with Eric is his passion to solve problems.

Yep. I think like what is like super interesting because, okay, Eric is, I think, one of the people out there that like in this small world of like data, if related people, he is well known, like people know him. But what I've seen, like talking to him live, that like I couldn't, I mean, I experienced the same way like through Twitter or whatever else. It's like his passion for solving problems. Like it's like the definition of problem solver. Like I'm pretty sure that like, I don't know.

I'm very confident that like model is going to be something great, but that's not going to be the end for this guy. Like he just cannot stop solving problems that he finds. So that's amazing. And that's like, you know, like one of these traits that you can see, like, especially in like engineers, not all of them, obviously, but like some, especially like the older, I mean, people who started like in NGV eras, not all of them, obviously, but like some, especially like the older. I mean, people who started like in these, like interacting with computers in an era that were not like that accessible, right?

Like, yeah, he talked about the nineties, for example, and all that stuff. So yeah, this is very interesting passion that's, I think it's like the most important thing that I'll keep from this conversation. I agree. And for those, I mean, you should listen to it in general because Eric is just such a smart, fascinating person, but a couple of teasers here for the listeners. We got a lot of really interesting backstory. So we got the backstory on Luigi, you know, which is sort of, you know, at a, in its heyday was a very popular tool for orchestration, sort of a predecessor to airflow.

It's still in production at some very large companies. So that was really interesting. We got the backstory on early days at Spotify and Eric described the company culture as anarchy, but that produced a very like focused, powerful outcome, which was absolutely fascinating. And then of course we talked about, you know, the developer experience around deploying code, which is all about what modal is and you know, how they spin up a thousand containers in less than a second via modal. So tons of fascinating stuff. You're going to love it. Subscribe if you haven't, and we will catch you on the next one.